Post office link crashes

Jorhat, June 25: Many customers of Jorhat head post office have not been able to withdraw money for the past three days despite standing in long queues for hours primarily because of link failure.

An official at the post office said this was an all-India problem, which had begun after the core banking solution system was installed in certain post offices. “This is a server problem, which all the post offices in the country having core banking solution system are facing. It will not be solved immediately. Moreover, the data migration work, that is transferring customers’ data into computers and the master server all over India, is still on and is compounding matters.”

Bharat Neog, a pensioner, said today was the second day he had come to the post office to withdraw money. Being the tenth person in the queue, he was hoping the link would be restored before his turn comes.

“Yesterday I waited in the queue the whole day but there was no link. Today, I have heard link is intermittently getting connected. I hope I will be able to withdraw some money,” he said.

Neog had come to the post office from Dissoi Nagar in the district, about 4km away.

Munmuni Saikia had come from Garmur in the district on behalf of her 72-year-old grandmother, Togori Mudoi. “My grandmother came two days to withdraw money but today she asked me to help her because it’s so hot,” she said.

“In banks also we face this situation but it lasts at the most for half-an-hour. I have never faced a situation where an office has been delinked without prior intimation resulting in such suffering for its customers,” she said.

M. Borthakur of Malow Ali, who has several accounts in the post office, said he had come for the third consecutive day. He said earlier work at the counters took around five minutes. “After the core banking solution system has been installed, work takes hours, even days, to finish. Sometimes there is link failure, sometimes the server is slow.”

Another official of the post office said the employees, agents and customers were all fed up. “There are two problems. Sify, which provides connectivity, gets delinked for hours and we sometimes cannot log onto the central server at Chennai which is operated by Infosys,” he added.

Hiranya Gogoi, postmaster of the Tinsukia head post office, said no work could be done yesterday while link was restored in the second half today.

She said the situation was similar in Kokrajhar, Dhubri, Guwahati and all those post offices where core banking solution system has been installed because of data migration work. “We are all facing problems because of a slow software and intermittent link failures,” she added.

An official at the General Post Office in Guwahati also said work could not be done yesterday and today because of “link and server” failure.